M D Nalapat
The key strands for voting will be the degree of success in rolling back VVIP corruption, the improvement in the economy and leashing the state machinery.
May 31 could not
have been a pleasant day for the BJP leadership, given the slippage in
performance demonstrated during the bypolls. While BJP president Amit
Shah was his usual efficient, bustling self during both the bypolls as
well as in the run up to the Karnataka Assembly polls, the many weapons
and tactics deployed by his team failed to ensure victory. The 2014 Lok
Sabha victory was attributed to a single factor, the “Modi Wave”, rather
than to voter distaste for UPA II. The BJP exulted at its “superior use
of social media”, while in the process, several associated with the
internet backend of the election campaign made lucrative careers for
themselves “advising” and “assisting” political parties and candidates
to victory, to predictably mixed results. In India as in many other
countries, the surest guarantee to victory of a candidate rests in the
unpopularity of his or her principal opponent, and so it proved in 2014.
A small group of commentators and activists, including Subramanian
Swamy, S. Gurumurthy and Surya Prakash worked without pause over several
years to transform the positive image UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi had
at the start of 2004 into a negative one, with great success. The more
negative voter perceptions of Sonia were, the greater the backing for
the individual seen as the “Anti-Sonia”, Narendra Modi. Interestingly,
the Opposition even collectively has thus far failed to dent the image
of Narendra Modi within the public as an honest and well-meaning leader,
or create an image of the NDA led by him as being as or more corrupt
than the UPA. This lack of success may be compared to the meltdown of
the public image of the UPA, which took place by the close of 2012,
great gusts of negativity that became worse rather than better in the
period before the 2014 Lok Sabha polls and for about two years
thereafter. More than anything attempted by the large and hard-working
BJP organisational machinery created by Amit Shah, it is the lack of
success of Modi’s opponents to push him and his government into the same
dismal groove of public perception that the UPA fell into during
2012-14 which offers the Prime Minister his best hope for continuing to
be the legal occupant of 7 Lok Kalyan Marg, New Delhi even after the
2019 LS polls.
BJP office-bearers and spokespersons
uniformly assert that the party’s results of the 2019 polls will be the
same or better than was the case in 2014. Such confidence may be
misplaced. While there is no doubt that Narendra Modi remains the most
popular politician in India, votes will not get cast solely on that
account. Not simply Modi, but the top 99 individuals (all presumably
personally chosen by him for their tasks) forming Team Modi will be on
one end of the weighing scale as voters decide on their choices, much
the same way as it is not merely the captain but the entire team that
decides the outcome of a cricket match. Once he took over as PM, the
scale of the BJP victory ensured a free hand for the incoming Prime
Minister in 2014, unencumbered by any consideration other than choosing
what in his view was the most suitable candidate for each post, whether
these be in his “official” (i.e. bureaucratic) family or his “political”
family (i.e. key Chief Ministers, Union Ministers and party
functionaries). Modi was free to make whatever choices he wanted, and
this is what he did. Team Modi has been comparatively stable in its
composition, with practically no dismissal in the top tier. This has
given voters the chance to judge for themselves the success of the team
in fulfilling the expectations that they had about the Modi government.
Although television anchors speak with awe about the “Modi blitzkrieg”
just before polling in various elections, more than speeches, what
counts during that period are events, including changes in petrol
prices. The core of the electoral appeal of Prime Minister Modi is his
performance in the job. Speeches can only reinforce such perceptions and
not replace them.
Rajiv Gandhi suffered a point of
inflexion in his mass appeal with the decision to overturn the Shah Bano
judgement of the Supreme Court. Should Modi find the 2019 results a
disappointment, his own point of inflexion may be the 8 November 2016
decision to render illegal 86% of the country’s currency at four hours’
notice, added to the clumsy way in which the RBI and other wings of the
state implemented the Prime Minister’s exceptionally bold decision. BJP
spokespersons continued till recently to see the demonetisation as a
popularity-boosting initiative, and have ascribed to it numerous
benefits, such as an end to black money, terror funding, tax evasion,
counterfeiting and the use of cash rather than plastic in transactions.
However, they do not seem to any more ask the electorate to make
contests a referendum on DeMo. It speaks for the generosity of spirit of
Narendra Modi that long after the drawbacks in the measure have become
patent, the civil servants who recommended it and who executed its
rollout have been given higher positions, an example being former
Revenue Secretary Shaktikanta Das. The new government’s broad mindedness
concerning the past record of civil servants is exemplified in the
promotions given to Das as well as others such as K.P. Krishnan and
Ramesh Abhishek, despite it being common knowledge that they were
exceptionally close to former Union Finance Minister P. Chidambaram. In
2019, voters will give their verdict on the On the Job performance of
these and other officials in Team Modi, including their success in
taking action against those misdeeds of the government in which they
were such an active part from 2004 to 2014. Among the key strands will
be the degree of success in rolling back VVIP corruption (the only kind
that matters to voters jaded by the moneymaking habits of those they
elect), the improvement in the economy (especially on jobs and income)
and leashing the state machinery so as to make it less a band of
mercenaries than a collection of sevaks led by “Pradhan Sevak” Modi. For
an Opposition leader, it is speeches that count at the hustings. For a
party in power for five years, it is performance.
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